Twenty-seven thousand years ago, in a stone-age village fenced in by mammoth bones, three young people were buried together, their bodies covered by burnt spruce logs and branches. A woman, disfigured perhaps by some congenital abnormality, was placed in the middle. To her left, a man was laid prone, his face in the dirt. To her right, another man had his hands angled awkwardly onto her groin, where red ochre, a pigment with ceremonial significance, was sprinkled. A thick wooden pole was driven through this man’s own groin and thigh, pinning him to the ground.

For archaeologists, including the researchers who exhumed this trio in the 1980s at Dolní Věstonice, a prominent excavation site in the Czech Republic, such burials are like prehistoric murder-mystery puzzles. The trio’s internment is one of the oldest examples of a “deviant burial”—a term in archaeology for graves that are atypical, unexpected, or just downright weird. Is the prone man’s position a mark of disrespect? Did the woman’s disfigurement change the way she was treated? And is the other man’s “staking” evidence (as some have suggested) of an ancient fear of the “dangerous dead”—the belief that corpses would rise from their graves to cause mayhem?

Historically, archaeology hasn’t paid much attention to deviant burials, which tend to involve peasants and criminals and are often discovered in excavations where time and resources are limited, precluding detailed analysis. But over the last few years, thanks to a broadening focus beyond the lavish mortuary practices of the elite, the field has begun to take a much keener interest. Researches have been systematically collating the phenomenon, revealing that these deviant burials weren’t just some fringe practice, but surprisingly widespread across cultures. A whole array of gruesome techniques now have been reported, all with the apparent intention of keeping the dead firmly in their graves.

The remains of the “vampire of Venice” who was buried with a brick in her mouth, in order to allegedly prevent her from consuming plague victims. (Ho New / Reuters)

In Eastern Europe, for instance—where Bram Stoker drew inspiration for Dracula—there have been numerous discoveries of corpses that have been “staked.” Bulgaria has had multiple cases of 700-year-old skeletons with ploughshares—the hefty blade of a plough—thrust through them into the ground. Recent Polish excavations unearthed skeletons with sickles placed around their waists or the necks. Other techniques—such as “stoning” (weighing the corpse down with heavy objects)—have been found all over the world, from 4,000-year-old Bronze Age burials pinned down with huge rocks, to graves from Ancient Greece weighted down with amphora fragments, to medieval English skeletons buried under grinding stones. The approach of ramming something firmly in a corpse’s open jaw has been observed both in 8th-century Irish “zombie burials” and the grave of the “Vampire of Venice,” a 16th-century skeleton disinterred from a plague cemetery with a large sized brick wedged between the teeth.

“Burying people face down means they will only dig themselves deeper if they re-animate.”

Abundant media coverage has followed these discoveries, which has fueled public fascination, but often frustrated archaeologists, because many of the stories are based on unpublished findings that have yet to be thoroughly scrutinized. When further Polish excavations found decapitated skeletons with skulls placed neatly between the feet, for instance, tabloids screamed “vampire burials.” But the local Polish press pointed out that there were medieval gallows nearby, which suggested that the bodies simply were executed prisoners. Some scientists worry that media biases could be influencing archaeology itself. Simona Minozzi—a paleopathologist at the University of Pisa—argued that the media hype surrounding the Vampire of Venice was backed up by only a single publication that lacked “adequate scientific evidence.” It “cannot be excluded that the brick slid accidentally into the mouth,” she wrote.

To actually get to the bottom of these strange practices and resist misdirection, archaeologists have begun to develop new systematic approaches by collating deviant burials into datasets. The most comprehensive analysis was performed by Andrew Reynolds, a medieval archaeologist at University College London’s Institute of Archaeology, for a book he published in 2009. He tracked down obscure references from the musty basements of university libraries, eventually compiling practically every known burial from Anglo-Saxon Britain: a staggering 25,000 burials. Reynolds plugged the data into a vast spreadsheet, which allowed him to organize the information into categories like “position of decapitated heads” (most commonly “missing”).

Thanks to this approach, Reynolds was able to draw broad inferences into deviant burials in Britain that up until his project could only have been guessed at. The most common deviant burial type, for instance, was a prone burial, which Reynolds says in fact was a superstitious measure “to prevent the corpse returning to haunt the living.” (“Burying people face down means they will only dig themselves deeper if they reanimate,” he points out.) Post-mortem decapitation similarly seems to have been used to lay “a suspect corpse to rest.” The dataset allowed Reynolds to probe for historical influences on mortuary practices, revealing, for example, that the introduction of Christianity led towns to exile the “dangerous dead” from the new church graveyards and bury them at the margins of society. (Distant crossroads were a particular favorite for this, as they give the “re-animated corpse lots of options in terms of direction of travel—hopefully not in your direction!” Reynolds says.)

Last year, a similar systematic study was published by Marco Milella, an anthropologist at the University of Zurich. His project covered the whole of Western Europe from the first to fifth centuries, confirming that deviant burials can be discovered well beyond Britain. While Milella warns that applying “concepts derived from later times and completely different cultural contexts (e.g. vampires) is a risky exercise,” his data is powerful evidence that a fear of the undead wasn’t just isolated to the “vampires” of Eastern Europe. There were some cross-cultural, systematic forces at work.

In folkloric sources as diverse as Babylonian literature, the shroud-eating Nachzehrer of Germanic tradition, and the Chiang-Shih “hopping vampires” of Chinese legend, notions of corpses rising from the grave have long been documented. But what these new archaeological datasets reveal is that these ancient accounts weren’t just stories that our ancestors told to each other on dark and stormy nights. Many of our forefathers were genuinely scared, taking time and trouble to ensure that the dead stayed where they belong.

Why this fear in the first place? One widely accepted explanation, outlined by the folklorist Paul Barber in his book Vampires, Burial, and Death, is rooted in the panic that would grip a society during a deadly epidemic. The first person to die from a disease often would be blamed for the ensuing outbreak, and the body would be exhumed for investigation. Thanks to the process of decomposition, the corpse would be found transformed from its previous cold, pale, and stiff state: Fresh-looking blood would be seeping from the lips; the face would be ruddy; the body would be engorged, and have a “fresh, new skin” that made the nails and hair to appear to have grown. The corpse might even “gasp” if a stake was driven through its lungs, releasing foul and noxious gases, Barber notes.

As for why the threat of vampires and zombie still captivates us today, that’s much harder to pin down, Barber tells me. After all, the science to debunk these myths is quite a bit stronger than it was centuries ago. Perhaps the undead stir up our deepest fears about our own mortality? Maybe they simply make for great television and movies? Rather than entertaining any large-scale cultural or anthropological explanations, Barber prefers a more grounded perspective. “Who the hell knows?” he says.

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Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”